Expansion Pace & Number of Cities

[mad hadder]

Hi all. I’m really struggling with the pace of expansion in VP. Vanilla Civ V I understand (four city tradition), Civ VI I am comfortable (expand as early and often as possible), but for whatever reason the ideal pace of VP eludes me. A few examples:

- In my most recent game as Russia I went tradition and settled 4 cities by classical and another two when I unlocked pioneers. Focused my cities on science and production in general, but now that we are entering the modern era I am 7 techs behind the AI leader. It just feels like I can’t keep up technologically with some of the sprawling AI empires in that game. What did I do wrong? Not enough cities? Too many? Settled too many too early?

- My other attempts at progress and Authority have been thwarted by too quick expansion, as my cities have been inundated with unhappiness and my economy is crippled. So clearly I am not an expert at going wide either.

Here are my TLDR questions:

Ideal number of cities for Tradition?
How quickly to peacefully expand in Progress?
How many cities to settle in Authority and when to go conquering?

thanks in advance!

 

[vyyt]

I am no expert, by I think that you can actually expand quickly with progress, but you need to be careful about cities growing too quickly without sufficient infrastructure.

I check the sources of unhappiness in my cities often, I often invest in buildings and sometimes reassign city working plots in order to increase the needed yields while slowing down the growth (you can even stop growth temporarily until you catch up with infrastructure as an emergency measure).

 

[andersw]

Hi all. I’m really struggling with the pace of expansion in VP. Vanilla Civ V I understand (four city tradition), Civ VI I am comfortable (expand as early and often as possible), but for whatever reason the ideal pace of VP eludes me. A few examples:

- In my most recent game as Russia I went tradition and settled 4 cities by classical and another two when I unlocked pioneers. Focused my cities on science and production in general, but now that we are entering the modern era I am 7 techs behind the AI leader. It just feels like I can’t keep up technologically with some of the sprawling AI empires in that game. What did I do wrong? Not enough cities? Too many? Settled too many too early?

- My other attempts at progress and Authority have been thwarted by too quick expansion, as my cities have been inundated with unhappiness and my economy is crippled. So clearly I am not an expert at going wide either.

Here are my TLDR questions:

Ideal number of cities for Tradition?
How quickly to peacefully expand in Progress?
How many cities to settle in Authority and when to go conquering?

thanks in advance!

It depends a bit on land and map settings but ...
4 Cities sounds a bit on the low side even as tradition, most say you want around 6 but I think 4 should be doable?
Authority depends a bit on how close neighbours are, what neighbours, what difficulty and if you have a good early UU or not.
I probably do anything between 4-8 before wars depending on whats possible.
Its easy to go on a downward spiral if you expand too fast before discipline.
I find it suboptimal with calendar lux or water lux because you need to go on tech paths which is a bit slower.
For authority you need gold from somewhere, religion (open sky, cathedrals), markets, lux trade you will hit a point where you will really run out of money unless you have some of these.
(Circus maximus tends to help a lot when I get it online.)

 

[Fluffball]

Ideal number of cities for Tradition?

Ironically you don't really want to stay too small with tradition in VP you need to keep up your unit supply numbers. If you stay too small you will end up with a tiny army and be forever at war with neighbours who see you as a week easy target.

Usually with tradition i make 3 core cities (so you can build guilds in each) which focus on great people primarily, which i attempt to grow as much as possible constantly and you will generally be producing so many resources in those cities that happiness will not be a problem for those cities.
I then have some satelite cities which are initially placed to snag land and resources, with them usually being placed so they can pick up at least one new luxury resource and/or a strategic resource or sometimes just because they have a great strategic position.

I usually manage growth in the satelite cities, restricting them when i am short on happiness or simply holding them at neutral happiness points at certain times so i can ensure my core cities can always focus on growing as quickly as possible.
If i have an annoying neighbour, see the opportuinty to take an easy city or simply did not have much room to expand i often take cities also as more satelites.
Satelite cities also act as a buffer which can be sacrificed in the short term if needs be to buy time in a war.

You shouldn't be afraid to place cities reasonably close to each other as i find my core cities actually work very few tiles and primarily the population is working specialist slots so i often end up with a lot of core city tiles worked by satelite cities with the core cities only generally working heavy food tiles and great person improvements.

Tech wise, you obviously want to be working great scientists in your core cites and making academies rather than bulbing the scientists until very late in the game and then generally i find i have good parity with the AI in general. Usually if they have more techs than me it is often a backfill difference where i have focused on something in particular like a military tech or a wonder tech and left a number of (now cheap) techs alone. Number of techs is not always a key factor but tech parity or being ahead of the AI in certain techs is more important.
If i have an agressive neighbour i will usually beeline military tech to try to get a tech advantage or at least tech parity and if there is an important wonder i will often beeline the tech for that wonder which often leads to the backfill disparity i just mentioned but it ensure i can achieve what i actually need to.


How quickly to peacefully expand in Progress?

I must admit i find progress a little wierd and it often relies on the circumstances being right, particularly in the early game, for it to work for me. Progress seems like the 'grab loads of land peacefully' tree but runs into a lot of problems doing that and relies a lot on circumstance which can usually be more easily counter by tradition or authority.
First of all it relies on you having a large amount of available land which you isolate somehow from the AI's so you can expand at a pace to suit you rather than having to build cities to take that land before the AI and then often encountering happiness issues which means you can't grow your cities which is the general issue early game where you have to expand for progress to be worth it (later on) but by doing so you end up with major happiness issues which means you can't grow the cities you found to build more setlers and build the infrastructure needed to keep up so you kind of hope you can stay peaceful in the early to mid game until you have got all your cities setlled and over the mid game happiness hump so you can start actually growing them and catching up with the hope you have caught up enough in military techs in particular before the AI come knocking on your door.
If you can survive that then late game it is very strong.

If you haven't got a large space you can partition off your usually better going authority if you want to go wide so you can have a good military to counter the inevitable border tension and can claim AI cities if they get there before you.
If you do have a reasonable amount of space to expand it is usually much easier to go tradition early game and use the strategy i mentioned above as you will be in a much better position early game and want to go semi wide you can take AI cities sparodically throughout the game.


How many cities to settle in Authority and when to go conquering?

When i go authority it depends on how close the nearest AI is as to how many cities i found but my usual tactic is to found a city next to my first target which acts a base to heal and a fallback position if you need to wear down the enemy and then when i have a suitable army i DoW them.
This means usually one city after my capital but if the distance is large i will usually put an intermediary city also so it is not so easy for the AI to cut me off and surround me.
How quickly this DoW occurs is usually down to the amount of barbarians around and i will usually farm barbarians to start with to get the bonuses from killing them while i build up my army to a strong enough point to combat an AI civ and i have my outpost city on their border but if i run out of barbarian i might DOW a little earlier and simply farm enemy troops for a while before peacing out (if needs be) and DoWing them again when i am ready to attack properly.

Killing enemy troops is the main driver of authority and generally you always want to be fighting someone to get the bonuses from killing enemies which is one of the main perks of authority and tempting enemy troops into vulnerable positions so you can kill them is just as valuable as capturing cities and worst case if you can't kill enemy troops you want to be at least leveling up your troops to make them stronger so you can kill them in the next war.

When going authoriity i alway go for god of war to also get faith from killing enemies which means you can guarantee a religion and then if you get orders also faith can be a massive driver for your empire.

 

[HalveBlue]

In my experience, expand as much possible and as quickly as you can, especially early.

Having more cities is almost always better in VP, as opposed to vanilla.

Your primary throttle for expansion should be your happiness rating. Keep expanding until you get close to the 50% threshold.

 

[mad hadder]

Thanks for the answers here, very helpful. Is it ever worthwhile to delay settling a city if you are close to unlocking pioneers or colonists? Obviously it is risky but the immediate infrastructure upon settling seems worth it.

 

[Laz0r]

Essentially this mod is far easier to snowball in when you go wide and conquer as much as possible. You should almost always be focusing production, gold, and culture, and finely controlling population if happiness is an issue.

The fundamental truth is that if you can eliminate other competitors and capture lots of cities early, you become impossible to invade given that your empire will be larger then the rest, and will output yields per city that more than make up for culture/science per-city scaling. Tall play VP is essentially done for the challenge or roleplay, and is much more punishing to mistakes or AI's wonder stealing

 

[Stalker0]

I'll give my perspective for Immortal Play on Standard Size Maps (generally Communitas_79).

For Tradition: I think 6 cities is the perfect number. Now realistically 5 is actually the perfect number yield wise, I find it most optimal, and if I could get away with it it would lead to the fast victory in most cases. However, I find 5 cities just cannot provide the supply and production you need if your dealing with any real aggression against you long term.... so I compromise on 6.

For Progress, 7-9 cities in most cases, and often that's filling up my space, so I don't really have room for more without conquest. Unhappiness is your main issue here, my plays for addressing it:

• Lux Trading: I will buy up every lux I can get my hands on from the other AIs.
• Mercantile CS: An early Mercantile CS ally can actually give you quite a bit of happiness. I will often go the Roman Forum and use my first GDiplomat to secure a mercantile CS if there is one near me. It really changes the game on happiness this early. Other CS allies can still give you key luxs for happiness, but obviously the mercantile one is the best.
• Once a city hits 4 pop it usually starts making settlers for the next round of expansion. If I'm not building a settler I will cap its pop at 4, maybe 5 if I'm doing well on happiness. Any more than that is just going to slow down your expansion, and the idea here is to blast out your cities....then focus on stabilizing your happiness with infrastructure and the Progress equality policy....then allow for growth to continue again once your stable.

Note that because of the capped nature of progress cities....I generally build them for quick and immediate gains.... aka I don't care how cool the city is going to look in 100 turns....I care about what its going to do for me for the next 40 turns with 4-5 pop. As such, I look for cities with a bit of food, a lot of hammers....and some really nice resources or natural wonders. But again I'm only looking at the first 4-5ish plots. By doing this you narrow the locations for your city plants, which also generally enables you to found more cities because your not trying to take up wide amounts of space like you do with Tradition.

Last note since you mentioned science. I can tell you that unless your playing on low difficulty levels, the AI will almost always outtech you until later in the game. You simply cannot beat the raw bonuses they bring to bear. Now with optimized play you start to catch up in the Renaissance and beyond. But yeah through Medieval the AI is commonly many techs ahead of me, and that is completely expected.

 

[psparky]

Last note since you mentioned science. I can tell you that unless your playing on low difficulty levels, the AI will almost always outtech you until later in the game. You simply cannot beat the raw bonuses they bring to bear. Now with optimized play you start to catch up in the Renaissance and beyond. But yeah through Medieval the AI is commonly many techs ahead of me, and that is completely expected.

If true, that makes me very sad. One of the main reasons I love VP is that it got rid of the vanilla paradigm where you were always playing catchup, but it seems perhaps it is creeping back into the game in recent versions. I hope that can be reversed.

 

[stii]

Well the thing is once you catch the AI the game is simply over. While the AI is a lot better than basic civ it still can't handle a human on a level playing field.

 

[ShadedSkies]

Quickly and a lot. The faster/more, the better, and make sure the cities grow too. Happiness isn't an issue if you pursue luxuries, know what to build and pick progress. In my current game I was able to get 100% happiness with 10 sizeable cities on turn 147 epic deity (https://ibb.co/FmcLt6w). The holy trinity for tallwide is barracks, forge and arena. These three cover all bases except cash (until you build circus maximus after which it does that too) while pressing down distress, boredom and illiteracy. Defensive forward-settling should stop the AI; you might as well because they'll always hate you once you start to win and traverse the globe to kill you. Might as well direct their attention towards a mountainous fortified city where your army is stationed and not the 5 tile coastal city with a caravel.

 

[mrpilhas]

I've been playing a lot of Progress with Incas, that I love since that patch that makes mountains more common, and I usually can settle 7 cities in the first 100 turns. First 2 settlers come from Capital, then the others come from those new cities. Like stalker said, I stop growing them at 4-5 pop until I manage unhapiness. Usually I have space to fill with 1-2 more cities that I do with Pioneers.

 

[Grassland Farm]

My experience as Progress is that to be successful you need to get your Workers setting up the new cities extremely fast - ideally they get a City Connection on the turn they're founded or the few next (for the 3f 3s bonus) and they contain decent production in the first circle, usually a hill or Mine resource upgraded ASAP by those Workers - so that they can actually build things up and not be dead weight, mostly the Monument because you need every culture you can get.

[Edit: Actually maybe wrong? See below]
Also: while I'm not sure it's the most optimal thing to do, I've noticed the somewhat interesting contrast between:
Progress: Gets good Science out of Citizen births in the capital (on Opener) ; so building Settlers here is more appealing
Tradition: Has an overall better capital and 1 culture/2 citizens in the capital ; and culture is very scarce for them early on and they want to complete the tree ASAP ; so building Settlers is more appealing... elsewhere!

 

[azum4roll]

You only get the science on birth the first time the city reaches that population. You definitely want to build your settlers elsewhere, if viable.

 

[Grassland Farm]

You only get the science on birth the first time the city reaches that population. You definitely want to build your settlers elsewhere, if viable.

Holy crap my attention is terrible if that's true. I could've sworn I had recieved the yields when bouncing back and forth around 5-ish pops. I'll probably play Progress next game so I'll keep an eye out.

 

[greenfieldpark]

You only get the science on birth the first time the city reaches that population. You definitely want to build your settlers elsewhere, if viable.

................i really should pay more attention. I was purposefully building settlers in my cap to get the bonus multiple times.